Video | Tideway TBM lowered 53m ahead of tunnel drive

Tideway, the company building London’s ‘super sewer’, installed the machine at its Kirtling Street site near Battersea Power Station.  

The two TBMs, Millicent and Ursula, will be used to dig the central section of the Thames Tideway Tunnel, a 25km sewer tunnel being constructed to tackle the problem of sewage pollution in the River Thames.

Millicent, named after Dame Millicent Fawcett, an English suffragist, will tunnel 5km from Kirtling Street to Carnwath Road in Fulham. While Ursula, named after Audrey ‘Ursula’ Smith, a British cryobiologist at King’s College Hospital, will tunnel 7km from Kirtling Street to Chambers Wharf in Bermondsey.

The two TBM cutterheads – which weigh over 850 tonnes each – took approximately eight hours each to lower into position.
Once lowered the machines were placed into launch adits, otherwise known as starter tunnels, before work to complete the build of the TBMs, which will be over 100 metres long when fully built, begins in earnest.  

When fully assembled, each TBM will weigh in at 1300 tonnes, and will be the project’s largest, of six, tunnelling machines. The TBMs will remain underground for almost two years as they dig the tunnels.

The Kirtling Street is in the central section of the Tideway project which is being delivered by the Ferrovial Agroman UK and Laing O’Rourke joint venture.